Institutional Foundations of Democratic Backsliding in Latin America

• In Event: Judiciaries in Democracy and Autocracy

Abstract

Political and legal institutions form the infrastructure of governance in countries around the world. Executives and legislatures define the “rules of the game” in the form of constitutions, laws, and decrees; courts interpret, apply, and enforce those rules; and political parties animate politics under those rules. Institutions enable and constrain the behavior, work, and interactions of political actors and private individuals; guide the direction and pace of political change; and undergird how democracies work. When political and legal institutions are well-designed and function effectively, they facilitate good governance and meaningful citizenship. Yet how well-designed and effective these institutions are vary dramatically over time, across countries, and among institutions in the same context, with significant consequences for how governments operate, how citizens experience the state, and democracy’s quality and endurance. This variation is particularly salient in Latin America, where institutional effectiveness differs considerably across jurisdictions and time.

This paper examines a specific subset of politico-legal institutions in Latin America: the complex network of state entities ostensibly designed to prevent public officials from acting unlawfully and to hold them accountable when they do so. Institutions such as public prosecutors, auditing offices, and transparency agencies – which O’Donnell (1998 and other work) referred to as “agents of horizontal accountability” and which comprise what we call the “architecture of accountability” – are of undeniable importance to the rule of law in the region. Yet the form and function of these institutions may also have implications for democracy: public authorities undermining accountability institutions, we theorize, both facilitates and flows from democratic backsliding.

Since 2000, more than two dozen countries have experienced democratic backsliding (Rau and Stokes, APSA 2023), many of them in Latin America (see also Luhrmann and Lindberg 2019). In 2022, for instance, 43% of the world’s population faced a decline in democratic quality, living in countries understood to be “autocratizing” despite being classified as democracies (Papada et al., 2023). Alarmingly, recent scholarship finds that actions by elected leaders are today the core cause of democratic erosion, in contrast to the more sudden regime takeovers of the past (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018; Bermeo 2016; Haggard and Kaufman 2021). Certainly blatant, headline-grabbing forms of executive overreach such as arresting opposition leaders and shuttering congress (see, e.g., Levitsky and Loxton 2018), or engaging in manipulations that compromise the integrity of elections (Norris 2017), are crucial elements of democratic backsliding.

Yet before and after these overt assaults on democracy, presidents and other public authorities often introduce subtle changes to accountability institutions – quietly reducing the jurisdiction of key watchdog agencies, or decreasing funding to public prosecutor’s offices, for instance – that both facilitate executives’ blunter, more egregious attacks on democracy and complicate resistance to them (O’Donnell 1998; Varol 2014; Haggard and Kaufman 2021). Leaders often insist that such institutional changes are “legal” and “democratic” – in line with the constitution, and/or supported directly or indirectly by popular vote, arguments that frequently persuade their followers (Bermeo 2016).

The presence of particular accountability institutions in Latin America varies significantly over time and across countries, and their gradual weakening is potentially extremely consequential. Nonetheless, scholars have yet to generate complete and accurate maps of the “architecture of accountability” in Latin American countries; produce detailed accounts of which public authorities weaken accountability institutions and how they do so; create techniques to precisely measure this institutional trend (Jee et al 2022); or to understand the implications of incremental institutional degradation.

This paper seeks to fill those gaps. First, the paper advances an original conceptualization of “institutions of government accountability” (IGAs). We then present an initial analysis of data collected on more than 50 characteristics of all of the IGAs that existed from 2000 to the present in Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, and Venezuela, describing and comparing patterns in their design and reform. Finally, we offer some initial propositions about the causes of the institutional variation we observe, and hypothesize about their possible consequences, in particular with regard to the pace and trajectory of democratic backsliding in the five polities.

Authors

• Simon Ballesteros, Georgetown University

• Diana Kapiszewski, Georgetown University

• Fernando Barros de Mello, Carlos III-Juan March Institute of Social Sciences